Print is something that's really, really hard to do if you're not on Adobe's products. I recently had to prepare a set of playing cards for printing. My workflow was SVG Template + data + script for processing them into finished SVG cards, then using Inkscape to convert them to PDF. It works really nice, but I totally forgot about CMYK. Trying to adapt that pipeline to another colour space and colour profiles to match what the printer accepted proved to be impossible. Ghostscript happily takes a colour profile, only to ignore it (without warning). Converting RGB to CMYK worked, but turned out to be not the best choice because you cannot get pure black that way, ever. And finding anything to replace colours in the finished PDFs turned out to be impossible, too. Except for Illustrator.¹
The whole thing being a side project I really wanted to make it work with free (both meanings) software as much as possible, but some things are pretty damn hard that way. Of ourse, if all you do is web or other screen stuff then there are plenty of options beside Adobe, and lots of them free or free™.
TL;DR: In some lines of work there really is no way around PS/AI/ID because that's what the whole industry is working with and also because the alternatives are lacking in some crucial areas.
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¹ By now I found out that SVG 2 supports device colours and Batik has an experimental branch where those are implemented, which means I may just switch from Inkscape to Batik for the next printing run and try that.
Is the design of the playing cards open? I am always looking for nice demos for our open source database publishing software, which does handle cmyk + spotcolors etc. (https://speedata.github.io/publisher/index.html)
Sort of. Still busy with work and other things, but eventually it should all be available somewhere. Drop me a mail and I can give you a link. And your application looks like a very close fit of what I actually was looking for when I began this.
Black point compensation (didn't hear of it before, just looked it up) seems to be aimed at increasing detail in dark parts of photos where several different colours get mapped by the colour space conversion to more or less the same printed colour. It does not seem to be a method of saying RGB(0, 0, 0) should get mapped to CMYK(0, 0, 0, 1), no matter what the colour profile says.
A designer told me that RGB black is darker than CMYK pure black, thus the need for a mixed colour whenever you start with RGB instead of using CMYK from the very beginning.
I guess it is less about pricing alone. Many universities have trouble [1] with Adobe's Creative Cloud licensing which is mandatory for new licensing agreements.
Adobe apparently did not consider educational institutions in its licensing conditions.
For example, licenses need to be bought per user (individual persons) now, no longer per seat.
This makes it impossible to install Adobe software in labs.
Furthermore, storing student data in the Cloud is not (easily) compatible with data protection regulations at universities.
LRZ - the central computing center for all universities in Munich - had actually spent months drafting an acceptable licensing contract together with Adobe Germany.
In November 2014, Adobe USA told LRZ that they would not agree to this contract, essentially giving them the finger [1].
LRZ now recommends all universities to switch away from Adobe software where possible.
Given that Krita is 'good enough' for most courses, it remains to be seen whether that was the right decision for Adobe.
I read that as "Adobe got greedy"
Well, good for Krita.
Part of PS/AI success is that students use it at Uni (and later on at work, and most of the workflow, even going to printing uses it)